Teal Group Vice President Richard Aboulafia has a simple message for companies interested in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market: “You’re wasting your time.” Aboulafia acknowledges such a blunt phrase is “a slight overstatement,” but goes on to say in his August briefing letter, “While UAVs have enjoyed impressive growth and will continue to do so, there has been almost no impact on traditional manned aircraft markets. . . . I don’t think there will be any such impact in the next decade.”
U.S. Navy Undersecretary Robert Work told the Navy and Marine Corps in July to provide lower-cost alternatives to the Navy’s current tactical aviation plan, and to examine the consequences of terminating either the F-35B short-takeoff/vertical-landing version of the Joint Strike Fighter or the carrier-compatible F-35C. Work is seeking decisions in time for the 2013 budget submission.
With the U.S. Navy opening up to competition its lucrative contracts to provide ship- and land-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) services, Sweden’s Saab sees an opportunity to break into the U.S. unmanned aircraft market. With CSC acting as prime contractor, Saab is offering its Skeldar V-200M vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft to meet that part of the Navy’s UAV ISR services requirement calling for a system able to operate from its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
STATIC FIRE: NASA and Alliant Techsystems Inc. plan a 2-min. static firing of a five-segment, solid rocket motor (SRM) at the company’s test facility in Promontory, Utah, at 4:05 p.m. EDT Sept. 8. The motor, designated Development Motor-3, is the most heavily instrumented solid rocket motor in NASA history, featuring more than 970 instruments. “This test will continue to advance understanding of five-segment solid rocket motor performance and specifically assess performance at the highest end of the motor’s accepted temperature range,” NASA says.
LightSquared is digging in its heels, blaming GPS manufacturers for poorly designed equipment that makes it susceptible to interference from LightSquared’s proposed high-power broadband transmitters that use a frequency adjacent to the spectrum used by GPS.
SOLAR POWERED: U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific has awarded a $500 million maximum, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity, multiple-award contract (MAC) to Island Pacific Energy, Pacific Energy Solutions and Photon Finance on Aug. 19. The MAC contract will be used for the purchase of reliable, locally generated power from Solar Power Generation Systems (SPGS) at military installations in Hawaii. The work includes installation of SPGS on roofs, parking shade structures and vacant land.
Human-exploration managers at NASA are working out the 5% and 10% budget cuts ordered by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on its programs, including the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS), even as an outside consultant is telling them their SLS cost estimates were off base before the potential fiscal 2013 cuts were ordered.
LONDON — The U.K. Royal Air Force is due to receive the first of 14 new CH-47 Chinook helicopters for testing in 2013, with the goal of fielding the aircraft in May 2014. The U.K. has long said it wanted to increase its fleet of the Boeing heavy-lift rotorcraft, having announced plans for 12 new aircraft and two additional ones to replace helicopters lost during combat operations. The contract has a price tag £1 billion ($1.65 billion).
LONDON — The European Defense Agency (EDA) is preparing to take a closer look at radar technologies that could allow military personnel to look inside buildings.
The U.S. Army may have slipped a decision on the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM) into the next fiscal year, but competition between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for the multibillion-dollar program has not cooled, with both companies touting success in rocket motor tests. The motor is a key element of the JAGM, which must replace Hellfire and Maverick missiles carried by both low-speed helicopters and high-flying fighters and unmanned aircraft.
The U.S. Navy wants to refit existing DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with hybrid-drive propulsion systems—as well as incorporate the technology in future Flight III versions of the ship—to help save on fuel costs, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus says. “We’re very interested in hybrid drive,” Mabus told reporters Aug. 22 during a teleconference on Navy energy initiatives. “We’re looking at retrofitting the ships we have and [putting it on] the new ships we’re constructing.”
The U.S. Navy has some serious financial ground to regain to make its surface vessels shipshape again after diluting ship-repair expenses to pay for war needs, according to an exclusive Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN) analysis of Pentagon contracting data. As conflicts were heating up in the latter years of the previous decade, the Navy shifted its funding focus from ship repair to buying items like helicopter components or combat vehicles. (See chart p. 6.)
FIGHTER SHARE: The Russian government expects to retain its spot as the world’s second-largest fighter aircraft exporter, according to a new study. The defense ministry analysis says Russia should capture around 23% of fighter exports through 2014, about half the U.S. market share and well ahead of the U.K. Around 5% of deliveries during that period remain to be allocated. Deliveries of Sukhois will represent just less than 14% of the global market total. The fighter market share roughly represents Russia’s overall ranking in arms exports.
A clip from a Chinese TV documentary purporting to show a Chinese military-launched cyberattack on a U.S.-based religious sect is attracting the attention of U.S. intelligence and defense industry officials and has made it onto YouTube. A veteran National Security Agency cyber-warrior who viewed the clip classifies it as “very cool,” and says it could become an embarrassment to the Chinese government. In addition to YouTube, the footage, as of Aug. 23, could still be viewed on China’s CCTV website.
CANBERRA — The Australian government is in talks with U.S. government officials and Boeing about ordering a further batch of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets because of delays in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. The deal could be for up to 24 additional twin-engine fighters. A decision will be made next year, Defense Minister Stephen Smith says. For Lockheed Martin, the move raises the risk that it will lose 48 F-35 orders it was hoping to bank in Australia.
HOUSTON — Russia’s Progress 43 cargo capsule departed the International Space Station early Aug. 23, freeing the orbiting science laboratory’s aft docking port for the arrival of a successor supply freighter later this week. A Soyuz booster with the unpiloted Progress 44 spacecraft, loaded with 5,900 lb. of propellant, water, containers of pressurized oxygen, spare parts and research gear, is scheduled to lift off from the Baiknonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Aug. 24 at 9 a.m. EDT (7 p.m. local time).
Aviation Week Intelligence Network Exclusive Leading U.S. Navy Expenses 1999-2009, Ranked By Average Amount Spent Or Allocated Aviation Week Intelligence Network Exclusive Leading U.S.
SINGAPORE — Some Taiwanese defense officials are continuing to argue that no final decision has been made on whether the U.S. will sell the island nation Lockheed Martin F-16C/Ds. But others in the government are starting to come out publicly and say what people in the U.S. defense industry have suspected all along: President Barack Obama will not sell the country new F-16s.
The aerospace industry will be asked shortly for ideas on how $510 million in government money should be spent over the next three years to build an aviation and marine biofuels supply chain in the U.S. It also will be asked how much money it is willing to put into what the government intends to be a public/private partnership.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Raytheon officials are seeking government sponsorship for continued work on an SM-3 datalink designed to mate the ballistic missile interceptor with foreign ships. The project is eyed by the company to dovetail with growing interest in NATO to build up its missile defenses after last year’s declaration that such a defense is a core alliance mission. Work prototyping the dual-band datalink has been under way for at least two years, says Ed Miyashiro, vice president at Raytheon Missile Systems.
HOUSTON — Electricity surged through Robonaut 2 for the first time on Aug. 22, signaling the prospects for a “first motion” in several weeks. R2, a broad-shouldered experimental two-armed robot, was launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s STS-133 mission in February. Robonaut 2 was stowed in the U.S. Destiny lab, while NASA shuttle crews focused on completing the nearly 13-year-long assembly and outfitting of the orbital outpost.
